Champion of the people? US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren (r.) paints herself as a hard-luck survivor while living in a ritzy $1.7 million house. (AP)
Boston Come next November, Bay State Democrats are determined to win back what they consider their birthright — the US Senate seat that Teddy Kennedy occupied for 46 years until his death in 2009. But they may come to regret turning to Harvard Law School for their candidate.
Scott Brown’s narrow victory in a snowy special election in January 2010 was the kickoff of the worst year in a generation for the Democrats. He’ll face a less tongue-tied opponent as he seeks a full six-year term next November — but not exactly a woman of the people.
Elizabeth Warren, a 62-year-old millionairess, and her second husband (another Harvard Law prof) live in a ritzy $1.7 million house in Cambridge and donate to all the right (meaning left) candidates. Their net worth is at least $4.6 million, although The Boston Globe, in its endless series of puff pieces about her, never misses a chance to cite her “rise from poverty.”
The Warrens’ house is so well-appointed that when she sat down for an interview with New York magazine, she insisted that the mansion be considered “off the record.”
Like all the other Harvard Law stars, she’s not a native of the grimy state she would deign to represent. Born in Oklahoma, she’d never even lived in Massachusetts until 1995, when she was 46. This may explain her rather sketchy grasp of the state’s geography. Last month, Warren told a crowd in western Massachusetts, “You know you’re not as landlocked as some parts of the state.”
No, they didn’t know that.
Then there was her promise on an Internet radio show to go straight at Brown’s constituency: “I’m going for the hick vote here. Maybe we could start with stickers that say, ‘Hicks for Elizabeth.’ ”
Such tone-deaf gaffes won’t hurt Harvard Law’s anointed one for now. Her strongest primary opponents have already fallen by the wayside.
Warren had been in Washington the last couple of years before she returned to Massachusetts last summer for a precampaign “listening tour.” First, she’d been overseeing the TARP bailout. Then she was assigned by President Obama to set up the new federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
“I was told explicitly that this is a part-time job,” she told a congressional committee about her second position, which paid $138,000 a year, after the TARP position’s $192,000 salary. Nice part-time work if you can get it.
Backed by the usual suspects, Warren has quickly amassed $3 million in campaign funds. (After two years, Brown’s war chest is about $10 million.) George Soros was among the hosts of a Manhattan fund-raiser last month. She’ll need every cent that Moveon.org and Emily’s List can raise for her.
Brown, a male model in college, pulled himself up by the political bootstraps. He has started as an underdog in every race of his career, from town selectman all the way to the US Senate.
Asked in a Democratic debate how she’d worked her way through college, Warren harrumphed, “I didn’t take my clothes off.”
“Thank God,” quipped Brown a couple of days later on a radio show, outraging the Globe and all the media sob sisters in Boston. How dare he!
Warren’s biggest mistake thus far came in the early days of the Occupy movement, when she bragged that she had provided the “intellectual foundation” for the rabble, which is about as popular in Boston as it is in lower Manhattan.
Karl Rove’s PAC quickly put up a devastating TV spot, with cross cuts between Warren and the rioting riffraff. Chastened, she last week refused to sign a petition endorsing Occupy Harvard — an invitation-only event that began only after the administration closed every gate on campus in order to keep any of the 99 percent from infiltrating its pampered students’ designer demonstration.
Tarred with the Occupy brush, Warren responded with a TV spot of her own, made by her own committee. It was a collection of black-and-white snapshots showing her as a baby in 1940s Dust Bowl Oklahoma, as if her middle name were Joad.
We’ll see if that helps her win the hick vote in coastal western Massachusetts.
Howie Carr is a Boston Herald columnist.